IT Guy here. We (the IT and IT Security experts) continue to find that the more obtrusive a “turn off your ad-blocker” site tends to be, the *more likely it is* for that site to serve ads containing viruses or malware.
A great example of this is, I shit you not, Forbes.com. They refuse to let you see their content with an ad-blocker enabled, yet they do such a profoundly shitty job vetting their ads that their site has *repeatedly* served up Malware to end users. Yet they still demand your ad blocker be turned off or you subscribe to their content to see it.
Look, I get that content owners need to get paid. I think we can all agree on that. The problem is that until and unless ad networks are extensively vetted, and until and unless these site owners agree to compensate users infected with malware from their site for lost time or damages, then an ad blocker is more of a *LEGITIMATE SECURITY TOOL* than some mere banner ad blocker, more along the lines of your anti-virus suite or anti-malware scanner. I’d recommend anyone and everyone at home make use of ad blockers by default, to be honest, to protect yourselves.
So yeah. If a website calls you out on an ad blocker in anything beyond static images in place of ad blocks (like Reddit, Spiceworks, and Nexus Mods), then keep them blocked. More than likely, those cretins have served folks malware before, but they’d rather you unblock their dangerous ad networks instead of fixing the problem in the first place.
im a bad person who thinks bad thoughts like ‘ew what is that girl wearing’ and then remember that im supposed to be positive about all things and then think ‘no she can wear what she wants, fuck what other people say damn girl u look fabulous’ and im just a teeny bit hypocritical tbh
I was always taught by my mother, That the first thought that goes through your mind is what you have been conditioned to think. What you think next defines who you are.
the most jarring thing my dad has ever told me is that we’re the new 60’s
when i asked him what he meant he said that he remembered being a kid in the 60’s, he remembered the long hair and the sex and the push against an older, less tolerant generation for freedom. he was born in 1955 so he wasn’t intimately involved in the progressiveness of it but he said he remembered always understanding the younger generation because they spoke to children like him, children that were being raised in restrictive households that were more prone to rebellion. flash forward to our generation and he’s floored, he’s shocked and a little bit scared because he sees the same passion in us, the same struggle and desire for change but this time he’s the older generation. we’re the new 60’s and he’s the establishment we’re trying to change. and it just strikes me how circular this world is, and how every once in a while a certain generation comes around with their radical, progressive agenda. and one day we’re going to wake up in the future and find ourselves face-to-face with a younger, more progressive generation and we’re going to have to decide if we’re still with them or if we’re the new establishment they’re fighting against
I like to call this process a spiral rather than a circle. After all things don’t go back to the same situation and start all over again – there is a little process every generation, even though it seems almost the same – but it’s just similar, not the same, because we’re all humans, every generation, with similar attitudes and wishes and when we’re young we rebel and try to change the world that constricts us, the older generation who represents the restrictions – but when we grow older they subtly our values become the conservative values as our children are more radical than we used to be – but we are still more free than our parents and grandparents, we have achieved something- as you will, as every generation will. And so the circle comes around but on a slightly higher level and becomes a spiral – a spiral that is evolution of the mind.
everytime I hear about children of the corn I think about the guy I met at comic con who actually lived in the town they filmed that movie at, and on the farm where they filmed in the corn.
he was a teenager at the time and him and his friends would get drunk on moonshine and rustle the corn and let the air out of the tires of the production team’s trailers and shit.
and now there’s Wikipedia pages about how the children of the corn set was haunted and they thought they angered god but it was really just drunk hillbillies
I don’t like adding to posts but I also have a funny story like this, so I was watching the movie the Blair witch which takes place in burkettsville maryland, which to me is so funny because that is were my grandfather lives and the town is literally just old people and cows with their main street consisting of a post office. Well anyway he told me that after it came out people were coming in like bus loads to the town to find the witch and my grandfather lives up in the Mountain area and people were up in his property trying to find the witch and it made him angry so he went out and hung up stick people and stacked rocks and it freaked the people out so they started thinking something was out there when really it was my 80 year old Italian grandpa who wanted people out of his woods.
We had ghost hunters come to a historic house in my town to film and if you think every high school kid in town respectfully stayed at home that night instead of going to fuck up that filming you’re dead wrong.
this is comforting, actually, sometimes paranormal things are just a bunch of bored people dicking around in the woods.
proof that the idea of “if you aren’t successful by your 20s it’s already too late for you” is the biggest bullshit in the universe
I’ve spent 28 years of my life in near poverty, making some really bad decisions during my teenage and young adult years and in a constant whirlpool of things during my childhood contributing to my severe anxiety and depression. People in my life – family, people who bullied me – tried to /actively stunt me/ from making art because they were convinced I’d never make a living from it. but I just kept dedicating my time to my passion for art and polishing my knowledge and skills and making the active decision to improve myself as a person and im JUST NOW making my very first comic series that is looking like it might be successful
I’m nearly 30 let your passion for what you love pull you through the times that fucking suck, and your break will come. realize that people who are very successful at young ages either have money/privilege, or EXTREMELY lucked out. they aren’t the norm.
I saw a great post the other day about how frustrating it is that so much media very narrowly defines self-sacrifice as one character dying for another, and it reminded me of how much I adore Critical Role for cheerfully subverting that idea again and again and again. Don’t get me wrong, character death is certainly possible with a bad dice roll, but whenever things are controlled by some form of narrative, there’s a clear appreciation for scenarios that don’t involve killing off characters for angst or drama.
I mean, the obvious example is the perfect setup for a tragiheroic character death: Vex gets caught in the detonation of a trap in the tomb of the Raven Queen’s champion and is killed instantly, and her brother, distraught, demands that the Raven Queen take his life in exchange for hers. Raven Queen agrees, Vex starts breathing again… but Vax is still alive. The DM getting creative with what it means for someone to sacrifice their life (surprise! you’re the new champion of the Raven Queen and she’s got a series of creepy and ominously ill-defined jobs for you!) meant that we got a series of fascinating character arcs unspooling all at once.
Keeping away from the self-sacrifice = character-death idea also helps you avoid fridging characters. Percy’s backstory features his sister Cassandra helping him escape the Briarwoods… and getting shot down in the process. But when the party returns to Whitestone, they discover that Cassandra is not only still alive, she’s been working with the Briarwoods to dismantle the townspeople’s attempts to revolt out of a complicated combination of supernatural persuasion and her lingering guilt and rage over Percy having left her to die. The result—Cassandra’s sacrifice taking a very, very different form than the “died to save her brother” narrative—is a million times more interesting than yet another angsty backstory death.
You can apply this stuff to make villains more memorable, too. Delilah wanted Sylas back, so she raised him as a vampire in exchange for a different form of self-sacrifice: the work they’d do together in order to bring Vecna back into the world. The sacrifice can go way, way, way beyond the personal, to the point where there are bodies literally covering the walls.
Or you can have a heroic character refuse an act of self-sacrifice. Vex refused Sondur’s offer to make her into something stronger in order to protect her friends because she wasn’t willing to give up what he requested in return. She knows it was the right thing to do, but the guilt of that decision lingers and has done a lot to shape her character.
You can have a self-sacrifice scenario where the person in question knows that there’s no positive result but is willing to do anything to avoid the negative. When Allura’s teleportation circle malfunctioned, Kima knew that following her was probably not going to bring Allura back and could’ve resulted in both of their deaths, but she wasn’t going to leave her. And again, that act of heroic death was averted when Keyleth and Vex managed to rescue them from the ocean.
There are so many vastly more interesting ways to approach the narrative notion of self-sacrifice that go way, way beyond “so the character dies and everyone else is sad about it, the end”. The challenge that goes into approaching self-sacrifice in a creative way really pays off, and the kicker is that you can explore loss and fear and devastation without losing that underlying beacon of hope. That’s pretty cool.
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